Science
Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved
Aug 21st
The Mystrey is Natural Gas
The kind that heats ovens and boils water—specifically methane, is the culprit behind the mysterious disappearances and loss of water and air craft.
The hypothesis is that large methane bubbles rising from the ocean floor might account for many, if not all, of the mysterious disappearances of ships and aircraft at specific locales around the world.
Oceanographic surveyors of the sea floor in the area of the Bermuda Triangle and the North Sea region between continental Europe and Great Britain have discovered significant quantities of methane hydrates and older eruption sites.
The methane—normally frozen at great pressure as gas hydrates embedded within subterranean rock—can become dislodged and transform into gaseous bubbles expanding geometrically as they explode upwards. When these bubbles reach the surface of the water they soar into the air, still expanding upwards and outwards.
Any ships caught within the methane mega-bubble immediately lose all buoyancy and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Aircraft falling victim to these methane bubbles will lose their engines-perhaps igniting the methane surrounding them-and immediately lose their lift as well, ending their flights by diving into the ocean and swiftly plummeting to the sea bottom.
To provide a check on the accuracy of their hypothesis, the two scientists built a large tank, filled it with water to simulate the regions of the earth where ships and planes have reportedly disappeared over the last century, and launched large methane gas bubbles from the bottom of the tank towards a toy ship floating on the surface of the water.
The results were impressive and the physical tests mirrored the computer model. The two found that the ship sank if it was between the middle of a bubble and its outer edges. If the ship was far enough away from the edge of the bubble—or directly over it—the ship would sail on safely. Despite not sinking, however, if the methane bubble was big enough and the ship was positioned at or near the center of the bubble when it surfaced, every one on the ship could be asphyxiated. This would account for several famous cases where ships were found in the Triangle with everyone aboard dead without a scratch.
As a bubble surfaced the water rose dramatically creating a sphere of water. Yes, the ship would slide off the sphere, but as the bubble burst a huge jet or column of high-velocity water would slam onto the ship and in a matter of seconds drive it down into the murky depths.
Recent surveys in the North Sea region have identified sunken vessels that are very near previous methane venting/eruption sites.
But what a methane bubble would actually look like as it roars from the ocean depths breaking onto the surface of the sea no one knows. All who have experienced it are dead.
Dreams about taking exam, being naked — what they mean
Jun 2nd
You’re in a classroom and the teacher puts an exam face down on your desk. You pick it up and can’t really make out what’s on it; it’s blurry, or it’s in another language, or it’s in a subject you didn’t study.
You feel like you’re going to fail, even though it’s been years since you’ve actually been in school.
People commonly relive this scenario in their dreams, even decades after their last graduation. While many high school, college and graduate school students are cramming for real exams this week, you may dream about it if you have anxiety about being judged, or if you’re in a situation you don’t know how to handle, experts say.
Dreams are “an extremely rich source of practical advice, and other alternatives about what we’re doing in our lives,” said Deirdre Barrett, Harvard psychologist and author of “The Committee of Sleep” and “Trauma and Dreams.” “They’re just coming from such a different part of ourselves that they’re a very good supplement to our waking, rational thinking.”
The dreaming brain
Scientists know about as much about the dreaming brain as they do the waking brain — in other words, there’s still a lot to learn about how the brain creates the dreaming consciousness and wakeful consciousness, said William Dement, leading sleep researcher at Stanford University.
Dreaming happens during the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep. In a typical sleep cycle, there are 68 minutes of non-REM sleep and 22 minutes of REM sleep. An eight-hour night of sleep will include about six REM periods, during which multiple dreams can occur.
The body is temporarily paralyzed during REM sleep. But in a rare condition called REM behavior disorder, people act out what they are doing in their dreams, be it talking or running into a wall.
You are conscious in your dreams in basically the same way you are conscious in real life, but you don’t remember dreams as well because memory processing is down, Dement said. The continuity of real life experiences helps you distinguish waking life from the dream world. For example, you don’t magically reappear in a different setting in the real world, whereas it might appear that way in a single night of dreaming.
“In some ways, it’s very good we don’t remember our dreams very well,” he said. “You’d constantly be saying, ‘Did that happen, or was it a dream?’ ”
Inside your dreams
The symbols and events in dreams can mean many different things to different people, Barrett said. A dog might signal unconditional love to someone who has positive feelings toward canines; someone else with a fear of dogs might dream about them as a reflection of trauma.
But themes such as the “test you’re not prepared for” do tend to have common meanings for people. A similar dream occurs for people who had experience in acting as a child: They dream that they forgot there was an audition that day, or that they get to an audition and it’s in a garbled language, or they studied the wrong script — they’re being judged, or don’t know what to do in this situation. People also commonly have dreams in which they are naked in public, associated with feeling exposed or ashamed. This could signal that the dreamer feels socially inadequate in some way, Barrett said
These are “psychological dreams” that are telling you that you should figure out where in life you are having a block, or how you should handle your difficult problem, said Dr. Judith Orloff, author of “Second Sight” and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Nightmares can shed light into the dark areas of people’s lives, Orloff said. They confront people with what they are most afraid of, and can be used to work through underlying problems.
Orloff had one patient who repeatedly dreamed she was being chased on a cliff by an “evil pursuer” who was going to hurt her. The patient and psychologist figured out that the pursuer represented the woman’s abusive father. After working through it, the nightmare did not repeat.
Letting your dreams help you
If you want further insight into a difficult decision, consider asking a question before you go to bed, and then seeing what happens in your dream, Orloff said. Get a dream journal and write down the question at night; in the morning, without getting out of bed, write down everything you remember.
One patient of Orloff’s had to make a difficult decision about whether to take a new job, and dreamed that she was in the new position but had a negative experience. This helped her realize that she did not get along with the boss, and she decided against the job, Orloff said.
Dement said he is somewhat skeptical about putting a lot of weight in dream interpretation. Dreams are often hard to remember, the associations in them can mean multiple things, and you shouldn’t stress if you can’t recall details, he said. It can be quite difficult to summon a memorable dream to answer a question in the way that Orloff recommends, he said.
But Dement agreed that dreams can help with major life events. He himself once had a life-changing dream: He had been trying to quit smoking, but simply could not, and dreamed that he had coughed up pink sputum indicative of cancer.
“I felt just utter complete despair — I would never see my children grow up, I did it to myself because I didn’t quit, I hadn’t put enough aside to take care of my family,” he said. “Then I woke up. I never smoked another cigarette.”
Important discoveries have also emerged as a consequence of dreams. Otto Loewi, a German pharmacologist, is said to have dreamed about an experiment to show that the transmission of nerve impulses is chemical, not electrical. The experiment worked in real life, and Loewi went on to the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1936.
Some artists and musicians use their dreams for inspiration. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson drew on his dreams for “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
The bottom line: Trust your waking, logical thinking, but don’t ignore what your intuitive, feeling-based, visual side might have to say about difficult decisions through dreams, Barrett said.
“It can be very important to look to our dreams on anything that we’re kind of stuck on in our waking lives, because the dream thoughts are likely to be so different, and they may really think outside the box and come up with an answer that we haven’t awake,”
Focusing 192 lasers on one little target
Mar 19th
Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported Thursday they have taken a major step toward harnessing the forces that power the sun in an effort to create unlimited energy on Earth.
In experiments at the lab’s National Ignition Facility, the scientists successfully fired an array of 192 laser beams at a helium-filled target no larger than a BB shot and instantly heated it to 6 million degrees Fahrenheit. The gas vanished in a tiny explosion.
The scientists said that result marked the most important advance yet in more than 10 years of work at the $3.5 billion facility.
They are seeking two major goals:
– To create in miniature the explosions of thermonuclear weapons in order to validate the computer codes that test the safety and reliability of America’s nuclear stockpile.
– To show that the immensely powerful lasers can achieve safe fusion reactions that could be scaled up for the eventual production of unlimited and clean energy, a dream nuclear scientists have been pursuing for more than five decades.
Working toward ‘ignition’
The successful experiments by a team of 35 physicists, led by ignition facility scientists Siegfried H. Glenzer and L. Jeffrey Atherton, were described Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science. In coming months the team will start a new round of experiments seeking finally to achieve what they call “ignition” – a true thermonuclear reaction inside the laboratory’s tiny targets.
“We’re confident of our ability to start seeking ignition this summer,” Atherton said in an interview. “And we’re optimistic that at some point soon we’ll achieve it.”
To achieve that thermonuclear reaction, the scientists will attempt to use the lasers’ immensely powerful beams to reach temperatures of more than 200 million degrees Fahrenheit and pressures millions of times greater than Earth’s atmosphere – conditions found only in the interior of the sun and stars.
The beryllium target will be filled with deuterium and tritium – the isotopes of hydrogen – frozen into a crystal at 424 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and blasted by the lasers in a billionth of a second. The target will be held inside a tiny gold cylinder called a hohlraum, about the size of a pencil eraser.
If those experiments succeed, the hydrogen isotopes would be crushed instantly and explode inward until they fuse and yield vastly more energy than the laser beams had pumped into them.
The National Ignition Facility is a 10-story building that was dedicated in May on the heavily guarded and highly classified Livermore site. But for many decades, Livermore scientists foresaw the need for increasingly powerful lasers to reach ignition. Lasers called Janus, Cyclops, Argus and the 20-beam laser named Shiva were used to conduct crucial experiments that led to the 10-year development of the laser array.
Thermonuclear reactions
The new laser array will be used to trigger thermonuclear reactions mimicking in miniature the deadly energy of thermonuclear weapons, and those efforts are the principal aim of the project. It is largely funded by the National Nuclear Security Agency, which oversees America’s arsenal of nuclear weapons and seeks to maintain their safety and reliability as the weapons age.
But many scientists foresee that experiments like the ones at the ignition facility could lead the way to the eventual construction of large-scale fusion reactor power plants capable of generating countless megawatts of electricity using the hydrogen isotopes from ocean water as endless fuel.
B. Grant Logan, director of a separate and unclassified attempt to achieve ignition based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said the new report is highly encouraging.
The report, he said in an e-mail, shows “remarkable progress toward the scientific demonstration of fusion ignition and energy gain in the laboratory for the first time in the world. At the rate they are going,” he said, “it does appear to me that fusion ignition will be demonstrated soon.”
Can nano-technology mean a new energy source?
Mar 19th
It’s so tiny, you can’t see it with the naked eye.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered an energy source that you can see only through a microscope.
The researchers devised a process for generating electricity using nanotechnology. They plan to refine the process in hopes of creating a new environmentally friendly battery, among other products.
It works like this: Researchers used tiny wires, known as carbon nanotubes, to create a powerful wave of energy, according to Michael Strano, and MIT associate professor of chemical engineering. He is also the senior author of a paper on this new phenomenon, published in this week’s Nature Materials journal.
After coating these tiny wires with a layer of fuel, Strano said his team generated a so-called thermopower wave and stumbled across a reaction that may eventually be used to power electronics, computers and cell phones.
“This could lead to batteries that are up to 10 times smaller and still have the same power output. In the portable energy and energy conservation arena, we’re trying to find power sources that have a smaller profile but hold more energy,” Strano told CNN Radio.
To build a power source, such as a battery, it’s necessary to move electrons in a material from one end of the battery to the other, creating an electrical current. This thermopower wave MIT researchers discovered, using the class of molecules know as carbon nanotubes, does just that.
Strano said “some of the advantages of this technology [are] you can generate a lot of power from a very, very small device.”
And that’s not all. Most batteries on the market now are made from highly toxic heavy metals, which are very bad for the environment — metals like lead, nickel and cadmium.
Batteries made from this new thermopower technology would be completely nontoxic, Strano said.
“The materials we use to make these thermopower waves are organic. They’re not grown naturally, but they’re made of carbon. In other words, you could essentially incinerate them, or they would degrade over time, there’s no heavy metal residue,” Strano said.
There’s another potential benefit in using a so-called thermopower battery: energy savings.
“Most people don’t realize a battery sitting unused in your laptop is leaking its power away,” Strano said. “If you take all the laptop batteries that are produced in one year, in the off state, they’re leaking an amount of power during that year that we could store in a small nuclear reactor … and that’s power that’s essentially lost and dissipated just from laptop batteries.”
International Measuring System
Mar 19th
Click here for a interactive map
This map shows international measuring system of units and the chronology of the advance of metric usage around the world.
Only three countries – Burma, Liberia, and the United States – have yet to adopt the International System of Units as their official system of measurement (weights and measures). Although use of the metric system has been sanctioned by law in the US since 1866, it has been slow in displacing the American adaptation of the British Imperial System known as the US Customary System. The US is the only industrialized nation that does not mainly use the metric system in its commercial and standards activities, but there is increasing acceptance in science, medicine, government, and many sectors of industry.
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